This is a matter of impression rather than analysis, but I reckon that running down your opponents plays less well in the UK than in the US and that this is true equally of selling things and of politics. Americans applaud the spirited attacker where we sympathise with the underdog. Whatever it does for sales in the US, I don’t think it works here.

I am no slouch myself when it comes to handing out adverse comment and I admire deft and clever attacks in print on those who deserve it. I just don’t think it sells things. Perhaps that is because most of it is neither deft nor clever and much of it simply invites close scrutiny both of the attacker’s argument and of his own position. Knocking copy draws fire not just from the “victim” but from others, and those who deal it must be bomb-proof themselves.

It matters because quite a lot of US advertising and marketing material makes its way over here in the litigation software market which is my subject. It matters particularly because there is a UK resistance to the way in which litigation itself is run in the US, and there are prizes for those who can distance themselves from that. It is not that the buyers are anti-American – and it would be a pretty thin market if they factored xenophobia into their buying decisions – but as between all those largely US suppliers, those who appear most British in outlook (or at least recognise the differences) stand the best chance of getting a hearing.

It is easy enough to remove the overt Americanisations and change the spellings. It is possible to learn the vocabulary of UK litigation, to identify what is different between the procedures in the jurisdictions, and (less importantly) to Anglicise the demo databases, menus, manuals and labels.

What is much harder is modifying the style in more subtle ways. The strong tradition in the US of talking up your product by diminishing the opposition, usually takes the form of sweeping generalisations which seek to denigrate “other vendors”. One must assume that it works in the US, since it is so widespread in selling anything from politics to washing powder.

John McCain recently had a pop at Barack Obama, comparing Obama’s views on energy to those of the well-known thinkers Paris Hilton and Britney Spears. It was meant to paint Obama as a lightweight, as inconsistent, and as one who would stifle competitiveness with populist taxes and to convey the opposite, with added gravitas, about McCain. In the short term it worked a treat and Obama quickly declined in the polls, apparently on the strength of this one gibe.

It backfired not because it was not acceptable as a political tactic but because McCain did not think it through and under-estimated the backlash. The remark attributed to Obama which founded the attack was taken so far out of context as to be meaningless, and if McCain had checked his campaign donor list he would have spotted the fact that Hilton’s parents had recently made a donation. You would not describe Paris Hilton as a deep tactician but her response, delivered nearly naked from a sun-lounger, managed to make McCain look old, out of touch and mean-spirited.

The failure, though, was not one of strategy but of specifics. In general, point–scoring of this kind seems to go down well in the US and can have an immediate and positive impact in the polls.

In the UK, that kind of attack loses votes. Labour would have lost Crewe and Nantwich anyway but it took genius to convert a majority of 7,078 to having second place by 7860 votes. A lot of factors were involved, but the decision to denigrate the Conservative candidate as a toff played very badly. It was not just that it was cloth-eared – Labour’s own candidate claimed the seat as if by ancestral inheritance from her mother, had been privately educated, and appears in Burke’s Peerage, so the toff label was ill-judged – but mere mud-slinging is not a vote-winner. It engenders the feeling that all politicians are as bad as each other and its usual consequence is that people do not vote at all. By analogy, marketing materials which focus on the defects of rivals tend to put people off buying at all.

The last great exponents of commercial knocking copy in the UK are the airlines. BA did untold damage to itself by its campaign against Virgin. The budget airlines devote most of their marketing resources towards trying to damage their rivals and everyone hates all of them as a result. Their own positive messages get lost in the abuse. The punter simultaneously discounts the negative and misses the positive.

There are two exceptions, in the litigation support world as in politics or soap powder. One is where the adverse comment really does have substance and in a way which is both provable and has relevance to the would-be buyer. A known technical flaw in another product’s search technology is fair game, provided of course that one’s own house is in order on that front. The other is where the attack is genuinely clever. In UK politics you have to go back to 1979 (“Labour isn’t working”) to find an attacking campaign which actually won votes – the Conservative’s 1997 “Demon Eyes” campaign against Blair won prizes but probably put off more people than it won over.

Given that my role is to widen interest in the whole subject, I, of course, have an interest in shifting the debate from the negative to the positive. It is, frankly, hard enough to describe the concepts and clarify the benefits objectively to a lay audience without them having to filter out the inter-provider attacks. Few providers set out their costs, for good reason, and so stand or fall by the clarity with which they identify their USPs, the positive things which they have which others do not. I sometimes think that if they denied themselves the prop of making adverse comments about their rivals, they might make a better fist of clarifying their own virtues.

I would make an exception, in marketing as in politics, for strokes of genius. Whatever your political views, it cannot be denied that Gordon Brown seems to be making a pretty good job for himself of demonstrating personal unfitness for leadership. If one wanted to pick a moment when his downhill slide became a rout, it was when Lib Dem Vince Cable spoke of Brown’s “remarkable transformation in the last few weeks from Stalin to Mr Bean”. Sadly for Cable, the beneficiaries of his verbal genius seem to be the Conservatives rather than his own party and if, as is possible, erstwhile Lib Dems vote in droves for the Conservatives at the next election simply to ensure that Brown is removed, Vince Cable’s clever attack may be seen as a significant part of the cause.

Cable is worth studying, however, as a marketing role model for reasons beyond his skill with the stiletto. He is one of the few senior politicians who is willing to give credit where it is due, even to opponents. He wants votes in the same way as providers want sales. Those votes may come from the transfer of existing loyalties, but the largest group of potential supporters is the 40% of the population who did not vote at all in 2005 – the same percentage, as it happens, as in the US presidential elections of 2004.

To attract more buyers we need to make the whole concept more attractive, not just any one product, and to expand the whole market not merely take share from others. We don’t achieve that by spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt about other players.

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